Ben O’Shea: Spotify Wrapped enters bizarre new age in 2025 to enrage 700 million listeners

Etiquette dictates never asking a woman her age, but that hasn’t stopped Spotify is making a wild prediction with its latest Wrapped campaign.

Things that should be as simple as publishing platform metrics have become sources of equal amounts of hilarity and controversy each year, as publishers look for new and interesting ways to make boring user data go viral.

And this is almost always the case; people are clamoring to share their personalized insights. social media as soon as they can, either for the perceived privilege associated with having good taste in music, or to celebrate a guilty obsession.

Last year, the streamer was widely criticized for its turn to AI, resulting in a Wrapped offering headlined by a strange, generative AI “podcast” on each user’s listening behavior, light and heavy on insights.

There was also a “Music Evolution” feature like “Pink Pilates Princess Strut Pop,” which provided a description of a particular month’s listening habits exclusively on gobbledegook.

The hot topic this year is the “Your Listening Age” feature, which the publisher calculates based on something it calls “recall lift.”

The idea is that we feel most nostalgic for the music we listened to when we were 16-21; So Spotify looked at the music you listened to the most this year, comparing it to other users your age, and then reversed your “age” based on how old you would be now if you were 16-21 during the aforementioned period.

And some of the results were crazy. Spotify estimates Seven News Perth’s Jerrie Demasi is 100 and Sunrise’s Katie Brown is 21.

Enraging more than 700 million people is a rare feat, but one that the music streaming giant seems to be doing without fail, in new and strange ways every year.

The only people satisfied seem to be users in the top 0.01 percent of Taylor Swift listeners globally, which is undoubtedly quite an accomplishment.